Let This Candle Guide You
by Lauralot
Summary: The Winter Soldier has a bad memory.


A/N: Written for this prompt on the Captain America kink meme: _The reason the Winter Soldier was willing to just let Hydra/Pierce fry his brain was because they've convinced him that he's mentally unstable and that the electroshock is therapeutic. That any pre-fall memories he uncovers are actually delusions ("how could you have fought in WWII, it was 50 years ago", etc), maybe a side-effect of the serum, and need to be reported to his handler so they can monitor his mental state._

The setting is inspired by the comic story line in which the Winter Soldier went missing for some length of time in Brooklyn while he was on a mission. This fic is set in 1986, though the year isn't really relevant to the story.

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><p>"Just look at the mess you made."<p>

The Soldier bares his teeth in a wordless snarl. His knife is pressed against the Secretary's throat. Had he heard the Secretary come in, had he not been preoccupied with _remembering_, then the man would have been dead before he could sit down, another addition to the pile of corpses reeking of blood and waste in the doorway. The pile of corpses that had been sent to bring him in. But the Soldier did not hear him and now the Secretary is seated and the Soldier's knife is at his throat.

The facts are these: They are in a flophouse in Brooklyn, the Soldier has been off of the grid for three months, and he can _remember._

He remembers a man with a shield, remembers watching that man through the scope of his rifle, defending. A frail blond boy, too brave and too stupid to know when to shut up. Dance halls. The beads of a rosary. The hiss of a radiator. He remembers a mother. A girlfriend. A man with his face all red. A man inside a machine. Mission reports and the Dodgers and blood on ice and Coney Island and and _and_—

He remembers and there is a trickle of blood down the Secretary's throat, blooming from under the blade.

The Secretary's gaze is still and calm and makes the Soldier feel like a thing under glass. But it wasn't glass, it was ice and it will be ice again but it won't, because he isn't going back.

"Look at yourself," the Secretary says, and the Soldier understands then that the mess is not the bodies at the threshold. It's him. His skin is streaked with grime and blood and his hair is matted. There's a flush of heat to his face even though he _does not care_ what the Secretary thinks. He doesn't. "When was the last time you ate?"

"Shut up." Maybe his voice shakes but that's okay. It's okay because he has the knife and he can remember being human, being _free_, being able to talk back. And he's going back to that; the Secretary can't stop him. The Secretary isn't the one with the knife.

But the Secretary's eyes are bored and that's cutting. He looks at the Soldier like a parent who can't be bothered to raise a hand to a disobedient child and the Soldier has to look away although he doesn't want to. There's a soft exhalation from the Secretary; it's wordless but it is also a repetition of the previous question.

"I don't remember," the Soldier says. He hadn't intended to speak and he presses the knife a little harder, starting another rivulet of blood.

This time the Secretary sighs. He makes a face at the Soldier's words as if they're something mildly vulgar, as if "remember" is a phrase the Soldier has no business saying.

_Maybe it isn't_, he can't help but think, and shakes his head to brush the idea away.

"And what do you remember?" The Secretary does not move but he does not need to in order to glance at his watch.

He remembers waking to find his arm all in metal. Waking to feel ice crystals splintering and melting in his lungs. He remembers trenches and blue lights and air heavy with the smell of burning flesh. A shield and a flag. "The war."

"In Grenada?"

The Soldier's eyes drop down because he does not know what that is. He thinks of a skull with tentacles, squeezing, suffocating. "With HYDRA."

"In World War II?" There's a laugh in the Secretary's voice, but it's so sad at the same time. "That was over forty years ago. Don't you know how old you are?"

He feels ancient. He doesn't know a number, only the weariness that goes down into his bones.

"You're twenty-seven." The Secretary says it slowly, clearly, like it isn't the first time he's had to explain this. Like he's speaking to a stupid child. "You didn't fight in World War II. You weren't born then."

"I did." He isn't twenty-seven. Maybe he could have been three months ago, fresh from the ice, when his mind was empty. Now it is full to bursting and the pressure is mounting by the minute. He remembers too much to be just twenty-seven. He hurts too much.

"You should have been brought in long before you got to this state," the Secretary says. He doesn't sound bored now; he sounds angry, but the anger doesn't seem directed at the Soldier. There is a flood of warm feeling in his chest, though when the Soldier recognizes it as relief—or maybe gratitude—it goes so cold it winds him. He does not want the Secretary's approval or even his lack of ire.

The facts are these: They are in Brooklyn, the Soldier has been off of the grid for three months, he _remembers_, and he wants retribution.

"I won't entertain this delusion." The anger has slipped from the Secretary's voice. His words are soft like a blanket. The Soldier finds himself exhausted. "It isn't healthy. It isn't fair to you. Try to think about it logically. Can't you understand that you're too young?"

"I went into the ice." The plates of his arm shift, rearranging to form a tight and solid surface. It's involuntary, the same movement his body makes when responding to blows. The action does not drive the blade forward. There will be a lie now: the Secretary will try and tell him that there is no ice. But there is and the Secretary has been there to greet the Soldier while the slush still drips from his hair. He will not be fooled.

"That technology didn't exist in the second World War." The Secretary's eyes are unblinking and so very blue and suddenly they're someone else's eyes altogether and the Soldier has to look away a third time. "You think a person could be frozen alive before we built word processors? Do you think the technology for your arm could possibly outdate a fax machine?"

The Soldier doesn't know what a fax machine is. His arm has been called one of a kind. He isn't sure what makes it special. What he is sure of is they held him down and cut at the flesh that had been where the metal is now fused. He is sure that it hurt. "There were flying cars."

"We don't even have those _today._"

That's true. All the cars he's encountered in the past three months have touched the ground. But no, he _saw_ them. He did. Maybe they can only be found in certain places. Maybe they're just for soldiers.

Though, in that case, wouldn't he have seen them?

"I remember. And I remember the war," he says and though it's a struggle, his voice is steady. "I remember _him._"

"Whom?"

The Soldier's mouth does not open. He can bring to mind a shield, a uniform. The colors red, white, and blue. A gun tossed to him. A hand on his shoulder, sometimes big and sometimes small, sometimes reaching up and sometimes not. A roller coaster. A familiar face at a school desk beside his. He can see so many pictures. He cannot bring to mind a name.

"Whom?" the Secretary repeats, patient.

"He was…a captain?" The Soldier doesn't intend the question in his voice. He doesn't understand how he feels so small when he is the one with in control.

"There were hundreds if not thousands of captains in that war." The Secretary's gaze never drops to the knife at his throat. "Maybe you read about one."

"No." He doesn't read outside of dossiers on his next target. It isn't allowed. But his mind is full of names then, Verne and Mitchell and Hawthorne, journeys to the Earth's core and plantations and sins displayed in scarlet. The Soldier bites his lip. "He was my friend."

"Then you really ought to be able to tell me his name." His words sound like an encouragement though his sad little smile says he knows the Soldier can't do it. "But then, I suppose you can't tell me their names either?" The Secretary's eyes move for the first time, not to the knife but to the bodies. "They were your friends too. Your real friends."

"They weren't." No. They came to lock him up. To electrocute him. His friends fought HYDRA. Those men were HYDRA. It's not true. It can't be. He wouldn't hurt his friends.

"You've always had a bad memory." The Secretary shakes his head this time, wincing as the motion presses the knife a little deeper. "I'd hoped spending more time with the men would help to ground you. They took you drinking the night before you left for this mission, you know. You'd never been."

"No," says the Soldier, but he can remember music and the burn of alcohol. It seems so long ago.

"Surely you remember that? You told Dugan it was the best night of your life." The Secretary is still wincing, but his pain seems directed at the Soldier, like the involuntary flinch that accompanies seeing a grievous injury on a comrade's body. But the Secretary's never flinched for the Soldier's wounds, has he? Isn't he the one who orders the chair? "It was Morita's idea, Rogers drew the short straw and had to be the designated—"

A sound, loud and guttural and hurt, tears out of the Soldier. The knife goes flying, embedding itself up to the hilt in the wall that it strikes. The Soldier just has time to register the thin red line his blade has made on the Secretary's throat before his metal hand is over it, applying pressure. "Rogers was the _captain._"

The Secretary's words are a forced rasp. "What captain?"

"From the war." The Soldier's voice rises to a shout. With every syllable he is slamming the Secretary's body against the back of the chair. "He was my friend, I _remember._"

"I don't know what you're talking about." The Secretary's words are measured, careful, as though the Soldier is a feral and injured dog. "What war?"

His hand clenches. He could snap the Secretary's neck, he could. It would be so easy. But the Secretary's face is open and honest and the Soldier releases him, shaking. He keeps his eyes on the floor. It seems fitting that way, comforting. "World War II."

There's a sad laugh, and didn't the Secretary just do that? "You think—that was over forty years ago. You're only—"

"Twenty-seven." The Soldier is numb.

"Right." The Secretary rubs a hand at his throat. "Good, at least you know that. But you're getting confused again, aren't you? You should have let us know. We could have helped you before anyone got hurt."

Hurt. He isn't looking at the bodies but they're the only things he can see. It feels like the ground is rolling beneath him and the Soldier finds himself sitting down. "They were my friends?"

"What's that?"

There are dried splatters of blood on the left hand and skin under the nails of the right. The air is heavy with the scent of copper. "They were my friends. I—I think I hurt them." Really, really hurt them. His lungs won't bring in air.

The facts are these: They are in Brooklyn, the Soldier has been off of the grid for three months, and the Secretary says he is remembering incorrectly.

There are footsteps. There is a hand on his shoulder and the Secretary is sitting on the floor beside him. "You're all right. Breathe."

Shuddering violently, the Soldier bites his lip again. There is new blood dripping from his mouth. It probably makes streams through the grime and dried blood—friends' blood—on his face. He doesn't know whether to lean into the touch or break the Secretary's fingers. It's too much to handle, the touch and memories and bodies, and his right hand—weaker, less likely to cause accidental hurt—moves to push the Secretary's arm away.

But then the Secretary has his wrist. The hand that was at his shoulder is worrying at the split skin on the Soldier's knuckles. "What happened here?"

What happened is that his body is a weapon and he utilized it as such. But a weapon is not meant to fire without being aimed and no one had aimed him at his friends. He is broken, dangerous. He cannot speak.

"Have you hurt yourself again?"

"No." Splitting his skin while delivering a blow does not hurt. It hardly qualifies as an injury, let alone a compromising one; the Soldier is conditioned to carry on fighting without maintenance unless he has lost forty percent of his blood or suffered fractures in three or more limbs, or two limbs plus a concussion. That is hurt. This is not even an irritation, is it?

But the Secretary is stroking at the scrapes the way one pets a dog before snapping its neck so it cannot bark and alert the targets inside. There is worry behind his face that the Soldier believes is meant to be concealed, like a glimpse of an observer behind a two way mirror. "You hurt yourself again," he says. There is something in his voice, something soft. The Soldier doesn't have a word for it, just a craving for more, and he cannot help but lean in. "Can't you understand that's dangerous? The last time you did this, you lost your arm. I can't watch you go through that again."

The Soldier lost his arm in a fall. Or to a blade. He can't be sure. And his friends are dead in the doorway and the Secretary is bleeding and maybe he's wrong about his arm like maybe he's been wrong about everything else today. And for the last three months. "I didn't mean to," he says. He doesn't know what it is he's apologizing for; he only knows that he needs to apologize.

"And you didn't mean to hurt your friends, did you? But look."

And the Soldier does, staring at the bloodied faces and glazed, unseeing eyes. His hand is trembling in the Secretary's grip.

"You know if you get confused you're meant to report it," the Secretary tells him. It isn't a rebuke; it's light as the hand stroking the injuries the Soldier can't remember inflicting. "You have to. Look what happens when you don't."

And that, the Soldier _had_ remembered. Three months ago, when they'd arrived in New York, when he had first looked around and found it familiar, the order had come to his mind. Report irregularities. He had never been to New York, never hit balls with sticks in the street or snuck into a movie theater or pressed his body against a woman's and moved in time with music. Yet the images were there and vivid, like blood sprayed on a wall or bruises on a pale throat.

Report irregularities.

But he hadn't. Because irregularities would mean premature extraction and a failed mission. Irregularities would mean the pain of the chair. Irregularities would mean the loss of memories and the memories…they didn't hurt.

They made a lightness in his chest and in his selfish and stupid desire to preserve it, he has damaged himself and his friends and disappointed the Secretary.

"I'm sorry." He does not promise to be honest the next time, because of course there will not be a next time. He is dangerous and he has hurt people and malfunctioning equipment is to be replaced. "I didn't—I wanted to be good."

"You will be." There's an edge to the Secretary's words now and the Soldier would flinch, but the hardness does not seem directed at him and why should he shy away when he deserves twice over whatever punishment he will receive? "You're going to help us save the world. You're essential to our plans, you know. That's why you were chosen—without you, we can't give the world freedom. You think the serum that we gave you would have worked in a lesser man? We always knew there would be a possibility of side effects. But your instabilities can be controlled, provided you report them. The losses from an occasional malfunction are acceptable in the grand scheme of things. With anyone else, the effects would have been disastrous. You're the key to our victory. The future of humanity rests on your shoulders."

The light is back in his chest but the Soldier feels a wave of nausea despite the praise. His eyes cannot meet the Secretary's; his gaze stalls at the cut across the man's throat. "I hurt people." He tries to think only of the bodies at the door, tries to block out the fleeting recollections of decades of missions—no, not decades, he's only twenty-seven—but either way he's taken lives and broken down and how can he save anyone? How can he take pride in unearned commendation? "I hurt."

The Secretary stops touching his arm and that's deserved. Then the hand is stroking down his hair and the Soldier goes still, silent, uncomprehending. He can't remember ever being touched so softly but then, his mind is often wrong. "Any harm you inflict for us is deserved. Necessary. Those who stand in our way—if they succeed, they'll hurt far more people than you ever could. You're a savior. A hero. Or will be, once we fix you. You volunteered for this, remember? You leapt at the chance."

"I don't—" The Soldier wants to shake his head, but that would mean disrupting the hand at his hair and he thinks the loss of contact might hurt as badly as the sight of his friend's bodies. "I don't remember. Volunteering." He remembers the opposite, but. "I have a bad memory?"

The Secretary laughs. It's a nice sound. The Soldier isn't sure why he thought someone so nice would be capable of lying to him. "You do. It's why we have to look out for you."

"I thought I fought HYDRA," the Soldier mutters. It's a stupid thing to say. He doesn't, and how could he be made to serve a cause beyond his own? He's the world's most sophisticated weapon and its most effective soldier. He cannot be manipulated.

"And thinking got you into this mess, didn't it?" the Secretary says, not unkindly. "You don't need to think. We'll do that for you. And we'll fix you, we'll make sure that this never happens again."

He tries to empty his mind. He does. He wants to be good. They are giving him a second chance although he doesn't deserve it, although he is a pile of broken pieces and only his arm is worth salvaging. But he cannot _stop_ thinking. His thoughts return to the chair, the crackle of electricity and the scent of burning hair and skin. He cannot keep from tensing. "It's going to hurt."

"It's going to _help._" The Secretary's hand slips to the Soldier's jaw, guiding his head up until their eyes meet. It's like staring into the sun: dizzying and overwhelming. "Yes, it hurts. It's like a shot."

The Soldier knows about shots: his preferred weapon, after all, is a rifle. He knows the kick of the gun after a shot, the bang, the heat of the barrel, and the brain matter sprayed out of the skull. He doesn't think the shot helps the target, but it's not the target he should be concerned with, it's the world. And he isn't meant to be thinking.

"It hurts for a minute," the Secretary goes on. "But it helps for much, much longer. It keeps you safe. And it hurts more to be confused, doesn't it? Look." He is guiding the Soldier's head again, this time back to the bodies. "Don't you want to get better so you won't hurt any of your friends again?"

Unblinking, the Soldier cannot look away from the bodies. One of them is blond, though now most of his hair is almost auburn from blood. Rogers? The Soldier's eyes are wet. "Yes."

"And you will be. We can fix this. We can even make it so you can forget that you did this and then you won't feel sad for hurting your friends. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

For one brief and stupid second the Soldier thinks it is dangerous to forget and worries that if he lets this memory slip away, he might not understand how important it is to report future irregularities. He thinks he needs to remember the hurt to prevent a relapse. But the Secretary says that's unnecessary and the Secretary says not to think and besides, it would _hurt._ "Yes."

"Good." The Secretary releases him, patting him on the head again before the man stands. The Soldier remains seated, eyes fixed on the bodies. "Besides, you're building it up in your head to be worse than it really is. You'll say after the procedure that it wasn't as bad as you thought. You always do."

The Soldier doesn't remember that. He doesn't remember a lot of things.

The facts are these: They are in Brooklyn, the Soldier has been off of the grid for three months, and he is remembering wrong.

But the Secretary is going to help.

The Secretary leaves the room. The Soldier's eyes are still on his friend's corpses, little tremors running through his being, until something cool and solid is being nudged against the metal hand. It's a glass of water. The Secretary says the Soldier is dehydrated and chides him for not taking better care of himself.

Water. The Secretary brought him water. No one has ever provided the Soldier with water in his memory, and certainly not after he's behaved so very badly. His eyes are wet again and the wet is on his face, and as he clings to the Secretary, pathetic and shaking and making choked, ugly noises of gratitude, the Secretary does not push him away or even call him weak.

When the Secretary takes his hand and guides him out of the building, the glass of water remains untouched on the floor. The Soldier does not think to take it with him. The Secretary did not tell him to do so. Any need for water is forgotten by the time they reach the base and the chair anyway, though his skin is tight and his lips are cracked and bleeding.

The Soldier's always had a bad memory.

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><p>AN: The title is taken from the song "Candle on the Water," because I'm evil.


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